Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Ninety

Monday

Good morning, all my lovely readers. I wasn’t looking forward to waking up to another wet morning, but the forecasters seem to have got it wrong again, as when I trotted down the garden for my constitutional, it was sunny. Back to Felix Chicken in my bowl. My feeder of the day seems to have been in while I was out, as I also have fresh water and the radio is on. At least this feeder has some common sense and has tuned the radio to Talk rather than the woke BBC.

I just heard that asylum seekers have realised they can get double bubble if they claim in the UK and in the Republic of Ireland. They can freely pop across the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland and then stroll over the border into the Republic and claim again. I hear we have had 400 deported back to the UK. How come we accept them back when the EU won’t take them back?

Next up on the radio was Red Ed Millipede, who was talking to little schoolchildren and answering questions. One little boy asked what he could do to make the world a better place. Red Ed told him we could all be kind to each other, then went on to explain how he was doing his bit by building solar panels and wind turbines, which were both good for the environment and saved money. Is it now allowed for a government minister to lie to kids? Green energy is not saving us money; it is not cheap. It was Red Ed who told us it would save us £300 on our energy bills but didn’t say when. Now they have gone up by more than £300, so even if they went down tomorrow, we wouldn’t be any better off.

Another one of those Green stories this morning, this time it’s Great British Energy, which is neither great nor produces any energy. It has been boasting about how successful its first project has been. What was its first project? It seems it was putting solar panels on 11 schools — solar panels supplied by two Chinese manufacturers who are accused of using slave labour in their production. In fact, these Chinese solar panels have been banned by the government. It seems we now have one government agency supplying another state organisation with banned solar panels. What is going on?

I read that the North Korean nuclear-powered submarine, Hero Kim Kun Ok, may not be all it seems. Since being launched by Kim Jong-un in September 2023, it has been to sea for only a short period. It has spent the rest of its time tied up to the dock at the shipyard that built it, covered by a vast awning to stop satellites spying on it. But the rumours I hear are that the boat has major problems with its nuclear propulsion system. In fact, I hear they are so bad it is being ripped out and replaced with conventional diesel engines. Making reactors small enough, safe enough, and powerful enough to propel a nuclear submarine is not a simple thing. If it was, more of the world’s nuclear nations would have gone down this route.

Yet another migrant story hit the media over the weekend. This time, a routine room inspection at a migrant hotel walked in on two asylum seekers enjoying a sex session surrounded by cameras and lights. Apparently, not content with making black market money by making burgers in a hotel kitchen, working for a delivery company, or hand-washing cars, they have started performing on OnlyFans.

Normally, the age at which you receive your state pension is reviewed every six years. It was last reviewed two years ago and the current age limit set. Now the official State Pension Age (SPA) is 66, but it is going up to 67 between April 2026 and April 2028. It will then go up by another year, to 68, between April 2044 and April 2048. However, that is not good enough for our Liebore masters. This morning, they have announced a new review of the SPA — and we all know what that means: the SPA will either increase higher or the date will be earlier.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, it’s starting off sunny again this morning, but I bet it doesn’t last just like yesterday. The latest borrowing numbers are out for June, and I see we borrowed £20.6 billion, which was £6 billion more than June last year. That takes borrowing this financial year to over £60 billion. So much for the £20 billion ‘Black Hole’.

At 07:00 this morning, the Government announced that it had signed off on the final agreement for the construction and commissioning of Sizewell ‘C’ nuclear power station. The cost of the job is estimated to be £38 billion at 2024 costs, so you can add inflation at the current rate of around 4%. The money appears to be coming from a group of shareholders that includes La Caisse with 20 per cent, Centrica with 15 per cent, and Amber Infrastructure with an initial 7.6 per cent. This comes alongside French energy giant EDF taking 12.5 per cent; the remaining 44.9 per cent comes from the government via its National Wealth Fund. I suppose we will be borrowing this as well.

Yesterday there was the third major problem for SouthWestern Trains since it was nationalised. At 05:00 it was discovered there was a major signalling fault at Waterloo station, stopping access to 15 of the station’s 24 platforms. It was fixed by mid‑morning, but by then the system was in trouble with trains and crews out of position, so things were not anywhere near normal before the evening rush hour. But it was the report on the BBC News that made me prick up my ears. They went out of their way to explain that it wasn’t anything to do with SouthWestern being nationalised. It was apparently all the fault of Network Rail, who own and maintain the rail infrastructure. There is only one thing wrong with this excuse: Network Rail is also nationalised.

You might remember me telling you about the problems owners of older Citroën C3 cars who have had a notice from the DVLA to stop using their cars until a recall on its airbags has been completed. But there is a big problem in that Citroën simply do not have the capacity in its service chain to carry out all the necessary repairs as quickly as customers require, and some report being given dates in 2026 for the work. Stellantis, the owners of Citroën, have been looking into ways of speeding up the work, as clearly not being able to drive your car for six months is unacceptable. They have now announced that C3 owners can book their cars into Peugeot dealers, who are another Stellantis chain, for the work to be done. I wonder how much this will cut the waiting time.

I read that progress is being made with the demonstrator version of the GCAP demonstrator. According to the press release, two thirds of the structural weight of the plane is in manufacturing, and the aircraft’s main structure, wings and tail fins are now being assembled using cutting‑edge digital and robotic manufacturing by BAE. I also read that the makers have built a flight simulator that mimics what the design will be and has been flown by pilots from the RAF, BAE and Rolls‑Royce for over 300 hours. Isn’t it nice to see that us Brits can still make things?

Nigeria seems even worse at constructing power stations than we do. I understand that the Nigerian Grid is sized to be able to dispatch the 16.5 GW that the country is supposed to have the capacity to generate. The only problem is that it rarely manages to generate half that amount, leading to frequent blackouts. Now one of Nigeria’s billionaires has, through one of his big companies, Pacific Holdings, built a 1250 MW gas turbine generating station at Ajebamidele in Ondo state. The $2 billion plant was announced as complete at the weekend but can’t help with the power shortages as it is still waiting for its gas supply to be connected.

For over two years, Turkey has been in talks with the UK over the purchase of 40 Eurofighter Typhoon jets. For much of that time, Germany, one of the manufacturing partners, has been exercising a veto on the project. But earlier this year the German trade unions pressured the German government to lift the veto before there were major redundancies due to Germany running out of work. Now I hear the deal is about to be signed, and it could even be later today.

Wednesday

Hi folks, not a very nice morning again when I wandered down the garden. Legohead is a bit lost this morning as he has no PMQs to prepare for. Parliament broke up for their summer holidays last night — they seem to have longer holidays than the schools. Still, he will be busy later as I understand that Modi, the Indian PM, is over here to sign a trade agreement. Am I safe to meet him? Do they eat cats in India?

I was listening to the radio late last night — it had been left on all day — and I heard a couple of lefties reviewing this morning’s paper. They talked about a story that said the WEF had fiddled a report to push the UK down the list of successful countries so they could blame it on Brexit. The reviewers laughingly dismissed the story ‘because it is in the Express’. Well, this morning I see it is not only in the Express, it is also in the Telegraph, on GB News, on Sky, on Yahoo, Politico, and many others. It seems the story came from a Swiss newspaper who got a leaked internal WEF investigation into the misdeeds of Klaus Schwab, and this was just one where he told his people to move the UK from 4th to 8th, and India down just one place when they had fallen 20 places.

Yesterday Reform gained their first Member of the Welsh Senedd with the defection of a Tory to them. The defection of Laura Anne Jones was announced at the Royal Welsh Show, and she could be the first of many Welsh MSs if the opinion polls in Wales are to be believed. At the moment Reform are slightly leading Plaid Cymru for next year’s election.

With much flourish, Thameslink has announced that when the timetables change next in December they will reintroduce a direct service from Eastbourne to London Bridge, which was cancelled due to the COVID outbreak. They say it is for commuters and will bring passengers directly into London Bridge; Southern services run into Victoria. But just how useful the service will be to commuters is yet to be seen as it will only run four days a week, Monday to Thursday, and of course there is only one train to London in the morning and one back to Eastbourne in the evening.

I hear that in Pakistan people like to keep lion cubs as pets rather than cats like people in the UK. The only problem is they grow up to be full‑size lions and lionesses and then are dangerous. A lion in the Punjab escaped recently and attacked a woman and her two children. This has led to a crackdown by the Pakistani Wildlife Rangers, who have been rounding up cubs. I hear that they now have so many that they don’t think there is enough space in the national zoos to house them all.

Ryanair have a Boeing problem. It comes in two parts. Firstly, they have ordered the Boeing 737 Max 10 and it is years late in delivery. They have 300 Max 10s on order, some of which should already have been delivered, but the first 30 will not now be delivered until 2027 at the earliest. They had the option to switch the order to the smaller Max 8‑200, which they have been receiving for several years now, but decided to wait for the bigger plane. Secondly, they also have a problem over tariffs. Many parts of the Max 10 are made outside the USA and are subject to tariffs, meaning that Boeing need to put up the cost of the plane to make money. But Ryanair are known as tough negotiators on price and have almost certainly driven a hard bargain with Boeing and apparently told them that they won’t be paying any more than their contract price.

I read that many under‑30s don’t use kettles. Instead, they put a mug of cold water in the microwave and when it boils pop in a tea bag. Well, I can imagine nothing worse: a microwave is infamous for heating things patchily with cooler spots. That’s why microwave food always says leave for a minute after heating, so the heat spreads through the food. But this means the overall temperature drops and we all know you need boiling water to make tea. It also uses more electricity than an electric kettle with a mug‑worth of water in it.

Thursday

Hello folks, well the weather is looking better, no rain forecast today, so I had a pleasant pre‑breakfast excursion. Legohead is going to sign a trade deal with India this afternoon. I hear it is worth £6 billion a year to our economy, and we will be able to export cars and whisky tax‑free. Pity that the number of cars we make has fallen off so badly. Will it be one car in and one crate of whisky out.

It looks like the Government have hit the panic button over the illegal immigrants and have made last‑minute arrangements to house them at the Britannia Hotel, Canary Wharf. They say it’s a contingency plan, but I bet the immigrants will love the move—it’s a nice 4* hotel which even has an indoor swimming pool and gym. However, it was all done so quickly that the hotel didn’t have time to notify people with bookings, and they have been turning up only to find they are locked out. I bet the Government is not happy as they were saying they were closing a hotel and have suddenly opened another, and I’m sure will have to pay off the bookings in full as well as pay the Britannia to be ready to take any sudden rush at a rate which I suspect will be rather more than many of the hotels it uses.

The report into the Unite union hotel and conference centre build is not good news for Len McCluskey, the union’s former General Secretary. The report, which is heavily redacted because of an on‑going police investigation, says that McCluskey ignored legal advice that the proposed contract between the union and the hotel builder lacked many of the normal clauses in such a contract. However, McCluskey signed it anyway and later said he neither read the contract nor the legal advice. The weak contract allowed the builder to increase costs from the original £37.5 million to a final £110 million. In addition, it is alleged the builder gave McCluskey Cup Final tickets and use of a private jet.

I hear that the RAF F‑35B that was stranded in Kerala after being forced to land has finally been repaired by the team of 14 RAF engineers flown out from the UK on an A400M. The plane took off on Tuesday heading for Darwin, Australia. That is about 6,500 km, way above the F‑35B’s un‑refuelling range of 1,667 km, meaning it will have to land several times en route for fuel or be air‑to‑air refuelled by someone friendly, like the Aussies. But it has not been explained why it is going to Darwin. I can only speculate that its mother ship, HMS Prince of Wales, is either close to Darwin or will be soon. I wonder how much all this messing around has cost.

Next year Barcelona is going to demolish three of the port’s cruise terminals, A, B and C, in a plan to reduce the number of cruise terminals from seven to five. The remaining terminals D and E are operated by Carnival, G by MSC and H by Royal Caribbean (there is no terminal F). The seven terminals currently have the capacity to handle 37,000 passengers a day, and the plan is to build a new 7,000‑passenger terminal on the site of terminal C, bringing the capacity back to 31,000 passengers a day. This is all part of the plan to reduce the number of cruise passengers visiting Barcelona. Last year 3.7 million cruise passengers visited Barcelona, spending $1 billion in the city and employing 9,000 people. The people of Barcelona will be complaining when less money is spent and jobs are lost.

What is really going on at the Britannia Hotel, Canary Wharf? Tower Hamlets Council has admitted that we were lied to and there are illegal immigrants and asylum seekers in the hotel, while the Bell Hotel in Epping is said to have been emptied out. It seems very strange that locals saw the hotel residents being loaded into coaches and, shortly after, coachloads of immigrants arrived at Canary Wharf. Am I putting two and two together and making five or are we being moonlit by the powers that be? I suspect it is the latter.

Friday

Hi everyone, it’s quite a nice morning—a bit of sunshine and not too warm. I see the Government is creating an ‘elite’ police force to monitor social media from anti‑migrant accounts. This is plainly a ban on free speech, with our Government trying to force people to change their minds about the south coast being invaded by migrants.

I was sorry to hear of the death of Ozzy Osbourne earlier this week. He had suffered from Parkinson’s for quite a few years and, coupled with the vast number of drugs he took in his Black Sabbath days, I was amazed he lived to 76. I have heard many stories about him, and perhaps my favourite was when, high on LSD, he tried to talk to a horse. He said he realised he had taken too much when the horse told him to ‘F off’, so he went home.

Four passengers on a Carnival cruise ship visiting Bermuda have been arrested for drug smuggling. Reports say that they were in possession of compressed cannabis, cannabis gummies, and carfentanil. I had never heard of carfentanil and had to look it up. Apparently, it is a tranquilliser like fentanyl but 100 times more potent. Like fentanyl, it was developed as an animal tranquilliser, but where fentanyl is used for horses, carfentanil was developed for elephants and is a hugely powerful drug. In fact, one gram is strong enough to kill 50,000 people. A dose of 0.02 mg is enough to kill. Not a very nice drug.

Another day and another war seems to have broken out, this time between Thailand and Cambodia over disputed border territories. The dispute goes back to when the two current nations emerged and the border between them cut through some Buddhist religious sites and, every so often, re‑emerges—like now. I don’t know what kicked it off this time, but Cambodia has fired BM‑21 multiple rockets into Thailand, killing four civilians, and Thailand has closed the 500‑mile‑long border. This morning, I hear that Thailand used F‑16s to bomb a military establishment in Cambodia. It all seems to be escalating rapidly.

I understand that the latest row over the illegal immigrants is over the use of the debit cards they are given for their pocket money. The cards are loaded with £50 every week, which is supposed to be for personal expenses. It is meant to be spent in supermarkets on the likes of toothpaste, deodorant and shampoo, but reports say they are spending the money on drinking and gambling. The immigrants are not stupid enough to spend the money directly from the card as they know it can be traced, but use cashback and ATMs to pocket money and gamble with cash. We must be pouring millions of taxpayer pounds into the gambling industry.

This week’s cat story is about Minx, who disappeared from her home in Bristol 13 years ago. The cat was 5 years old at the time and had been living with Jade since she was a tiny kitten. Jade and her husband searched for Minx, but she wasn’t found. A bit back, an emaciated stray cat covered in fleas was taken into a vet in Fishguard, and the vet’s consultation revealed a chip and that the cat was Minx. They phoned Jade, who came and collected the cat, who she says recognised her. Jade took Minx home and nursed her back to better health and introduced her to her two children. Unfortunately, the vet’s consultation also revealed that Minx had cancer, to which she has recently succumbed.

You are probably aware that the Everglades in Florida are not just infested with alligators—they are now also infested with pythons. Now, there is a cull going on to try to reduce the number of snakes, as they are eating the local fauna. I hear that a New York designer has decided to make use of the dead snakes for fashion items and is using the remains of the snakes to make things like belts and handbags. I suppose the raw materials are free, so the items should be cheap—but I bet they are not.

Saturday

Good morning, my happy readers. Well, another nice morning when I wandered down the garden before breakfast. Today’s mad immigrant story is that Cooper-Balls wants to make it illegal to put more than 80 people in a rubber boatload of migrants on health and safety grounds. Isn’t it already an offence to break into the country in this manner? But I have been thinking about this and wonder who they plan to prosecute. It can’t be the smugglers, as they clearly don’t know who they are. Is it the migrants themselves, who are already breaking the law? Will it be the few over 80 people on the boat, and who decides which ones they are? The legislation is clearly ridiculous.

Another big order was announced by Airbus yesterday. This time, the order is from Dublin-based aircraft finance and leasing company Avalon. The order is for 75 x Airbus A321neo and 15 x Airbus A330-900neo. This is more good news for Britain, as I have said before. We build the wings for both aircraft types at Broughton, and Rolls make the Trent 7000 engine for the A330 in Derby.

The new political party formed by The Tramp and The Sultana has been launched by The Tramp under the name Your Party. But I had to chuckle when I saw the very first comment on the Your Party website was The Sultana saying that wasn’t the party name! Not off to a very good start.

I learn that there is a court case pending in Ahmedabad Rural Court over the use of the Mc prefix in a company name. McPatel Foods Pvt Ltd is suing the McDonald’s Corporation to stop the issue of threats over their use of the Mc prefix. It seems that McPatel Foods don’t even run a hamburger chain — they make an Indian brand of frozen chips sold under the ‘Ohh Potato’ brand. The case is scheduled to be heard next week, and as it is in an Indian court, I don’t rate McDonald’s chances of winning very highly, but we will see.

I hear a rumour that Boeing is negotiating with a foreign country to sell the C‑17s. Nothing odd there, I hear you say, but there is. Boeing stopped making the C‑17 in 2015, and restarting a production line that has been closed for ten years is no small thing. For a start, much of the space and equipment is probably in use for other production lines. Jigs and fixtures could well have been scrapped, and the skilled workers who operated the line have left the company or are employed elsewhere. For production to be restarted, the order will need to be for a decent number of aircraft. With regard to that, it seems that several countries have said they might be interested. I wonder if we would want to add to the eight we operate.

In the States, Coca-Cola has announced that it is to make a version of its cola available with cane sugar. Some years ago, they switched to sweetening ‘original’ Coke with corn syrup because it was cheaper. But in some states, Coke made by its Mexican bottlers is available, and that is still made with cane sugar. Many customers seek out ‘Mexican’ Coke, as they say it tastes better. Never having been to America, I have no idea if ‘Mexican’ Coke is better, but then British Coke is not made with corn syrup. Will American Coke drinkers seek out the cane sugar Coke, or will it make no difference at all?

I hear we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Turkey over the export of Eurofighter jets. If this leads to the promised order, it will be excellent news for thousands of BAE workers, whose jobs will be saved for several years, probably until the Tempest goes into production. We make around 37% of the Eurofighter in the UK and then perform the final assembly, so an order will be good news for British industries.

Well, that’s me done for the week, and it’s the windowsill for Larry today as it is quite nice out there. So, I think that it’s going to be a rather nice snooze. Chat to you all next week.
 

© WorthingGooner 2025